PunchMan Online

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

PunchMan Online is a free-to-play Arcade-style game released on mobile devices in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. This game has players fighting each other on blocky islands, trying to push each other off using punches.

Before starting, know that playing this game requires players to sign up for an account with the developer, requiring an E-Mail confirmation and everything. I found this to be particularly odd given how simplistic the gameplay here is, and this process was made more cumbersome because the game’s menus are poorly implemented with traditional gamepad controls – it is very clear that this was a game made with mobile devices in mind.

The presentation here is odd and rather unappealing. The game uses simple, colorful, untextured low-poly 3D visuals, yet despite the unimpressive graphics on display the game still suffers from nasty slowdown at times. These visuals are backed by rock music that is both forgettable and an absolutely terrible fit for the rest of the game.

As for that gameplay, players can punch, kick, and shove one another, trying to push one another off the stage. Depending on the game mode, they may be fighting solo or working in teams, with team play also including a mode where players must attack stationary enemy gemstones while defending their own.

Unfortunately, this game is loaded with issues. Firstly, all actions have an excessive cooldown, which makes everything in this game feel far more tedious than it has to be. Second, if you’re looking for anything resembling depth here, you won’t find it – this game has all the strategy of a slap-fight. Third, the hit detection here is awful, and I repeatedly found myself hitting opponents with punches that didn’t land, or tossing a bomb at them with no effect. Fourth, the camera controls here are terrible, with the game sometimes spawning you with a camera facing completely the wrong direction, and moving the camera taking an agonizingly long time.

On a final note, I should mention that when I checked, I saw that PunchMan Online’s online lobbies do have a few stragglers, but not enough to put together a full game. In order to review this game I had to play single-player games with bots. And regardless of how you play it, there are only two locations and three game modes. That’s it.

To put things simply, PunchMan Online is a terrible game, and it’s terrible in some inexplicable ways. It’s mind-numbingly simple, yet requires an onerous sign-in process just to play it. It’s aiming for an Arcade-style appeal, yet makes the action frustratingly slow and tedious. The visuals are ugly, yet performance is terrible. And everything is just so amateurishly made and executed. And despite all of this, there’s so little content and such a small online community here that even if you find some enjoyment in the dull gameplay, you’ll lose interest soon enough. In short, don’t waste your time with this game.

tl;dr – PunchMan Online is a free-to-play online-focused Arcade-style game where players try to punch each other off of islands. Unfortunately, the game is unnecessarily onerous to even start playing, the action is tedious, the graphics are terrible, the performance is abysmal, there’s a huge lack of content, the online lobbies have barely any players, there’s little depth, and the game just overall seems amateurishly made. If you want a free online multiplayer game to play on Nintendo Switch, you have many, many better choices than this.

Grade: D-

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